The New Yorker Summit: Geoffrey Canada on Exporting Lousy Teachers to the Suburbs

Geoffrey Canada is head of the Harlem Children’s Zone, a full-service organization dedicated to confronting entrenched poverty in Harlem. His unique program—which attacks all the problems associated with poverty at once, in a limited spatial area—has been widely profiled, and President Obama’s anti-poverty plan proposes the creation of twenty similar zones across the country.

“When you begin to look at data for poor children of color in Harlem, they are actually doing worse then when I started in the business,” Canada said. “If our goal was to end the cycles of poverty…we were not doing that.”

“Everything is wrong” in Harlem, he added. Everyone wonders which problems must be taken on first—gangs or schools or housing—but Canada realized this single approach was failing; they had to tackle everything.

His approach was first to, building-by-building, create communities like tenants’ associations, and make children understand who is in control. It’s not always clear who runs the community a lot of the time, he says. “We all have ‘Lord of the Flies.’ it’s not a pretty picture.”

He also designed a “series of best-practices programs starting with birth”—kids in Harlem are literally behind from birth, so people shouldn’t be forced to wait until middle school, where you need superheroes. If they are provided the same background full of cognitive and educational opportunities that the middle-class takes for granted, they can do better.

Scale also matters. Canada sees culture as something that is transmitted like a virus—so he needs to reach as many people as possible, including the most difficult kids.

Finally, he demands accountability. “Bankers get fired, people who fail poor black kids don’t,” he said. (Adding the caveat that it’s unclear if enough bankers have gotten axed.)

“If you are a lousy teacher, you should be fired,” he says, in response to Henry Finder’s question about tenure and the teachers’ unions. Then, if they can’t be fired, he suggests sending lousy teachers to upper-middle-class communities, “because they can afford one lousy teacher.”

He also focuses on a relatively simple educational reform that many believe is necessary to closing the achievement gap: expanding the school year.

Canada then declares that “teachers need to be paid like professionals.” His son, as a first-year lawyer, got paid $140,000 while he went through a rigorous training process designed to weed out people who can’t take it. He thinks teachers should be forced to “work like hell” and see if they could make it; his educational training, he said, lasted him until November of his first year in the classroom. It’s a hard job, and people who do well should be paid accordingly.